I was back at Puma City yesterday for the Social Media Breakfast. I took the Orange line in, stopping at Downtown Crossing and then wandering around there for a while trying to decipher the directions to the Silver Line. Took the Red Line to South Station, and got on the Silver Line for one stop to the Courthouse.

Got there early at 8:05 and mingled with so many great people, I won't be able to list them all.

Figure out what the company does and be able to explain it to someone.

3. Do the job.

Think about it. Who are they going to be interested in hiring, someone who knows nothing abot the company, or someone who has spent some quality time getting to know what HubSpot does and what they are about?

This is a video job. Be able to point them to your website where you can show off your video production skills. Make a video that they might be able to use on their site and post it to the web. Show them that you have the skills needed to do the job.

HubSpot opens up their offices every Friday at 4:00 when they broadcast a live web tv show, HubSpot.tv. Go to that. Meet the people. See what they are like and find out more about the company's needs for audio and video.

"Pioneering videoblogger Steve Garfield says that a combination of technologies will make it possible to stream live reports from the cell phones of citizen journalists to network news. The tremendous advantages this offers in the way of ubiquity, cost-effectiveness, and authenticity will almost certainly bring the kind of disruptive effect to television media that Internet audience dynamics has had on traditional print journalism."

Sunday, April 26, 2009

"Mr. Obama shakes hands with everyone, as is appropriate, for if American presidents dined only with leaders of high moral caliber and democratic disposition, they'd often sit alone at the table of nations."

I want to watch the preview of next season's Caprica TV show and am looking into streaming it to my TV.

Amazon Video on Demand allows you to view the show online, download to a PC or portable device, and also send it to either a TiVo box or connected device, which in my case is a Panasonic TV with VieraCast.

Once you sign up and register your device, you can watch either way. The differences are interesting.

Zack Braiker asked me to pass this along for his client, to help raise awareness about family homelessness. Zach writes on his blog:

I’ve always respected people who do. And it just so happens, that one of my clients, Trish Karter, is one of these people. She’s the CEO of Dancing Deer, an avid cyclist who runs a double bottom-line company. Dancing Deer’s corporate cause is family homelessness, and Trish Karter is advocating for that cause in a unique and real way.

From April 22-May 6 she’s climbing on her bike, travelling more than 1,500 and staying at homeless shelters along the way. The purpose of this ride is to raise awareness about family homelessness, and my company, refine+focus is helping introduce Trish to people on social networks for whom this cause is important.

We’d like to know what food reminds you of home and hear your comfort food memories and recipes.Tell us in a tweet or a blog post. And when you do, tag 7 friends as well. Together we’ll use our tweets and blog posts to raise awareness about family homelessness, our company’s cause.Now, we’re going to pass the torch to these people:

**And the rules**Link your original tagger(s) and list these rules in your post.* Share what food reminds you of home* Tag seven people at the end of your post by leaving their names and the links to their blogs.* Let them know that they’ve been tagged*Please Copy and paste the description below:Dancing Deer’s Sweet Home Initiative raises money for scholarships to help educate homeless women and end family homelessness. As a part oft his initiative, our CEO, Trish Karter, will be riding her bike 1,500 miles from Atlanta to Boston visiting family shelters in each city to raise awareness about this cause (see: http://tinyurl.com/dzynh5 ). She’ll also be recording stories from the women she meets along the way asking them about their experiences. One question she’ll ask them are what foods remind them of home.

Food that reminds me of home is American Chop Suey.

My mom used to make this for me when I was little, I made it at college, and I still make it on cold winter nights.

If you are lucky enough to have peppers, onions, garlic, mushrooms or tomatoes growing in your garden this season just add them to the mix - You'll get more servings out of this recipe and it will taste even better!

Thursday, April 23, 2009

Katie Couric is looking for you to submit videos to the CBS Evening News. She says:

Got 20 seconds? Tell us your thoughts about President Obama's first 100 days in office. My video explains it, but in a nutshell you have 20 seconds to tell us what President Obama did right, or what he did wrong. We may even play your video in our Webcast on April 29th!

In order to submit a video, people need to go to the Wall and click in the 'Write something...' space, then click 'Video', then choose either 'record a video with a web cam' or 'upload a video from your drive'.

Wednesday, April 22, 2009

Steve Garfield is making a stop in Washington D.C. on his way to New York for Streaming Media East (5/12) and while in Washington D.C. we are organizing a Drinkup on Sunday May 10th from 7:00 PM on at Capitol City Brewing Company.

I was on CNN.com/Live live today talking about Columbine, Gun Control and President Obama's trip to Latin America.

It was a neat experience. I producer called in five minutes before air and we connected via Skype. The video stream coming to my MAc was choppy so I turned on my Panasonic Toughbook to see the stream. There it was nice and clear, but hten the producer told me to shut that one off since it was sucking up all my bandwidth.

Going into the segment, I thought that they were going to ask me about what bloggers were saying about the issues, so I did some web surfing and brabbed some relevant posts. Searching around like that brought me up to speed on the issues, but in the end, what they wanted to hear were MY thoughts on the issues.

I think I did a good job on gun control by referencing the violence in the streets of Boston and how illegal guns need to be taken off the streets.

I can't tell you how much fun it was to compare and contrast the Bush foreign poicy of Axis of Evil with Obama's let's talk policy. I loved that!

TwitterIt was also fun to be able to post to twitter live and see responses. That is the future.

Technical Behind the ScenesI was wondering how the anchor would moderate a remote conversation between four people.I used Skype on a MacBook Pro, with a Canon GL/2 connected via a Firewire card, and an audio-technica AT2020 USB mic.

My BU New Media Tools for Journalism class is covering the Boston Marathon today with text, audio, photos and video. All their twitter posts, flickr photos, utterli and BlogTalkRadio audio posts, YouTube videos, Ustream and Qik live streams are being aggregated using friendfeed.

The Boston Globe's DC Denison has an article about Twitter in today's paper called So little space, so much ado. The article misses the point that marketers can use twitter listen to and engage customers.

I'm mentioned at the top of the article with this:

Steve Garfield offered a link to his video review of a new microphone.

Your readers might want to see what I was talking about. You could have even embedded the video, like this:

The beauty of twitter is that you're not actually limited to 140 characters since you can provide links to anything including text, audio and video.

DC goes on to say:

...in Boston, the most popular Twitter celebrities - including Fitton, Chapman, and Garfield - are for the most part marketing and advertising professionals using the service to stay on the front lines of communications.

I know the article has a marketing slant, but my twitter bio is pretty clear, I'm not a marketing and advertising professional:

Do serious marketers spend a lot of time and energy on Twitter campaigns? I doubt it. Sure, go ahead and play around with it — it doesn't cost much. But I defy you to do serious brand management in 140-character messages. I defy you to prove that Twitter users are your typical customer — unless you sell bubble tea or something similar — or that their tweets are a true reflection of their relationship with your company."

Davenport is only talking about serious marketers, and he missed one of the main benefits of twitter for marketers, it can be used to listen to and to respond to customer's conversations about their products.

Any good blogger, competing journalist or alert press critic can spot and publicize false balance and the lame acceptance of fact-free spin. Do users really want to be left helpless in sorting out who's faking it more? The he said, she said form says they do, but I say decline has set in.

One more point about blogging, see how I linked to Davenport's blog and blog post? That's how Boston.com should do it. Link out so readers can read more about Davenport's thoughts on twitter. He uses 3,891 characters to talk about twitter on his blog, plus he's gotten 44 comments ( excellent conversation going on over there ), and he links to an opposing view.

When I heard that twitter co-founder @ev was going to be on Oprah, I didn't feel the need to rush to get over exactly at 3:00. I thought Biz was on a flight to Chicago too. So I got over there at about 3:25 and I just missed Biz, but not the free burgers.

Hubspot's musical superstar Rebecca Corliss was there to greet me and show me the way to the food. Sliders! Yay! Note to B.Good, either make all the burgers medium-well, or put a flag in the rare ones.

The show is hosted by Karen Rubin and Mike Volpe. They broadcast live every Friday at 4pm EST, and if you are in the Cambridge area, you can join the live studio audience (just contact Mike and Karen to RSVP - they're at One Broadway, Cambridge, MA 02142).

They've got a nice setup for live streaming with three lights in the front and a few track lights in the back. Hubspot uses the whitelabel version of Ustream.tv called Watershed which allows customization among other features.

The show itself was much like a TV show, very well planned.

I spoke with Rebecca after the broadcast and suggested that they think about opening up the show more to people in the room, and people in the chat room, to make it less structured. One idea might be to do the 'show' for 20 minutes and then keep the live stream going for a free-form version where audience members both in person and on the web can participate more.

There's a tendency to copy what TV does. That works, but we also have an opportunity to push the technology to add interaction and conversation, and that's exciting.

It's an astounding menu of television and web programming, everything from heart tugging reality television, mini-documentaries and animated children's series, to fast breaking news and information. But this is no lineup for a national network. It's the variety of shows produced right here in New England by independent producers, work that is seen on local and cable outlets. Chronicle takes you behind the scenes of some of the area's most intriguing homegrown programs.

Links to all the Qik's sent in by students who attend this Qik event, will also be posted to the friendfeed stream. For those students who set up Qik to auto-post a twitter message, and who gave me thier twitter username, those posts will show up in the friendfeed stream too.

To add BlogTalkRadio, you click the little RSS Icon next to the username on your BlogTalkRAdio page and add that to friendfeed as a Custom RSS/Atom feed.

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About Me

Steve is a Social Media Traveler. Companies, brands, and destinations send my wife and I on trips in hopes that we will publicly share our experiences via social media. Examples include opening festivities for the Hermitage Club and traveling with GMC to the Super Bowl. (Go Pats!) We are available for more branded experience trips.